Burton looked down at the bottle in front of him. Its label bore the words, Saltzmann’s Tincture.
The name sounded familiar.
The cloaked man whispered, “William, if I wanted you dead, I’d have left you on the pavement with Sneed’s bullet in your chest.”
“Humph! I suppose.”
Swinburne uncorked his bottle and upended its contents into his mouth. He smacked his lips. “Hmm. Rather like honey or mead.”
Trounce clicked his tongue then drank.
Burton followed suit. He felt the liquid ooze down his throat.
“I asked who you are,” Trounce said. “Shall you answer?”
“It’s rather complicated,” came the reply.
The tincture was having an almost instantaneous effect on Burton. He felt warmth seeping through his capillaries. He sensed countless possibilities stretching away from him into innumerable futures.
“I have my given names,” the figure said.
Sunlight coursed through the explorer, shone out through his pores.
“And I have the names that I’ve adopted for one reason or another.”
Colours were detected as flavours. Sounds were heard as textures. Touch was received as scent.
“And I have the names imposed upon me by others at various times in my life.”
Though he sat motionless, Burton felt himself toppling forward and backward and sideways. Time became a permeable concept. He soaked into it and found no boundaries, no channels, nothing that flowed. He was everywhere in it. He was everything of it.
“At the moment, perhaps it would be best to go by one I’ve recently given myself; one appropriate to the circumstances I find myself in, for I am tasked with the manipulation of time, and therefore of reality as we perceive it.”
As Burton slipped away and eased slowly into another iteration of himself, he saw arms reach up to a hood, saw strong but very pale fingers grasp the material, saw it yanked backward, and saw a face he felt he would recognise if only he could properly focus his eyes upon it. They, however, refused to cooperate, and he was possessed by the curious conviction that the man seated before him had more than one head. For an instant—or perhaps for an eternity—it appeared that three heads occupied the same space. Then five. Then one. Then three again.
“I,” the individual said, “am perfectly impossible. I am self-created. I am paradox personified. I call myself the Beetle.”
A SOJOURN IN THE FUTURE OF A DIFFERENT HISTORY
Love and praise, and a length of days whose shadow cast upon time is light,
Days whose sound was a spell shed round from wheeling wings as of doves in flight,
Meet in one, that the mounting sun to-day may triumph, and cast out night.
—Algernon Swinburne, “Birthday Ode”
The cloaked man and the observation deck flexed and shifted out of perception. Once again, Sir Richard Francis Burton occupied his own mind as if he were a passenger in it. He was subjected to thoughts, memories, and impulses that weren’t his own, though they felt as if they were, and he found himself to be a separated fragment of consciousness that witnessed but could not motivate.
He was walking. It was all wrong. He was too tall. Physical sensation had about it a peculiar second-handedness, as if his body were operating some distance away and somehow relaying what it experienced back to him. His self-awareness was all askew. At the back of his mind, he could detect a ceaseless muttering as a part of him calculated how to move each leg, where to place each foot, how to maintain balance, what to do with his hands, where to direct his eyes. All the silent, instinctive, and automatic functions of the brain that usually went unnoticed were now akin to the background thrum of an engine, such as could be detected aboard a transatlantic steam ship.
It was so disconcerting that the environment didn’t immediately register.
Then it did, and all thoughts of himself were immediately vanquished by it. He was overcome. He could look, but he couldn’t process what he saw. It was simply too incredible to comprehend.
A moment of mental immobility then the disorientation passed. Piece by piece, he started to make sense of the visual and aural stimuli.
Initially, he thought he was back in Africa, striding through a jungle beneath a purpling evening sky. On closer inspection, he realised this was not the case, for the tangled vines, knobbled trunks, and twisting limbs of the flora surrounding him followed the contours of buildings, which ranged in dimension from low blocky structures to slender towers of such unbelievable height that their upper reaches were made faint by the atmosphere. Here and there could be glimpsed patches of brickwork, the angles of doorways and windows, panes of cracked glass, a sharp corner, the outline of a colonnade, a sloped roof, a cornice, and a myriad of other architectural elements, making it apparent that he was in what had once been a vast city, the substance and form of which was being consumed by vegetation. No! Not merely consumed—but mimicked and replaced! Where had once stood a tenement building there was now a cluster of huge nut-like growths, their inner flesh melted away, the remaining shells melded together like adjoined rooms, with oval doorways and window openings apparently having grown without human intercession; where once had soared a breathtaking tower, now there stood a colossal trunk, its wood riddled with hollows and passages, its branches blending into those of neighbouring columns to make bridges; what had once been a macadam-surfaced thoroughfare lit by gas lamps was now a wide moss-covered trail illuminated by glowing fruits, berries, and gourds.
All of it was every shade imaginable of red. There were Tyrian purples, deep maroons, bright crimsons, dusty violets, dazzling scarlets, soft hues of rose, earthy rusts, diaphanous magentas, glimmering tints of ruby, shadowy carmines, and luscious blushes of raspberry.
It should, perhaps, have struck him as hellish but, instead, he envisioned the entire world as a single living entity with this city as one of its pulsating organs. The vibrancy of its life was all around him. Sap throbbed like blood through translucent vines. Sac-like growths palpitated as if breathing. Pods shivered and rattled, seemingly engaged in some esoteric discussion.
There was a pervasive intelligence about it.
And life supported life.
Amid the riotous tangle, colourful butterflies danced through the air, and heavily laden bees droned industriously. Pollen swirled like a light mist, except that drifting tendrils of it sometimes made a sharp change of course that in no way related to any movement of the atmosphere.
There was a plethora of marvellous perfumes. Burton knew this, but he couldn’t experience them. He didn’t know why, but he had no sense of smell.
Birds chattered and sang and whistled.
Squirrels gambolled along branches.
Spiders weaved their webs.
And there were people.
They were moving through the rapidly deepening twilight, gossiping and laughing and conversing and singing and gesticulating and offering him friendly salutations as they passed. They called him “guv’nor.”
Most of them walked the trails. Some clambered from bough to bough. Others flew.
The majority were perfectly human in appearance. Many were not.
A woman, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, a tight-fitting jacket, and knee-length knickerbockers, scuttled across his path and plunged into the undergrowth. She had six crab-like legs.
A man, in a one-piece chequered costume, crawled by on all fours. His torso was preternaturally long, like that of a Dachshund.
There was a boy with suckered tentacles playing with a spinning top. There was an elderly gentleman with eight eyes leaning against a thick stem, softly singing, “I didn’t know I loved you ’til I saw the sky—” There was a girl with gossamer wings, a portly fellow with a single horn curving upward from his forehead, a faun, a centaur, a manticore, a cyclops, a sphinx.
Folklore and legend had come alive, as if liberated from the depths of human consciousness.
Where am I?
As soon as the questio
n was asked, the astonishing answer was provided. To his left, in a gap between corrugated leaves, on a patch of wall partially obscured by a bunch of grapes, a rusty metal sign proclaimed Gloucester Place.
Knowledge welled into him.
It was March the 19th, and the year was 2203. London. The Orpheus had come here from 1860 and had thus far remained for a little over thirteen months. During that short space of time, the phenomenal jungle had grown, dismantling the layered structure of the city.
The vaulted roof that, for generations, had enclosed the old ground-level metropolis was gone, and the working masses who, like troglodytes, had toiled beneath it, were free. Green Park, Regent’s Park, Hyde Park, and St. James’s Park, previously raised up to the exclusive heights, were now back where they belonged. The towers, once the province of the elite, were open to all.
The Burton of Trieste knew—because the Burton he currently occupied knew—that the aristocratic few who’d once held sway over the majority had, for the most part, fled the city, convinced they’d find some remote enclave, an island perhaps, untouched by the jungle, in which to reassert their dominance. They wouldn’t succeed. The verdure was spreading at a prodigious rate. Wherever they went, it would catch up with them eventually.
The world was changing and changing fast, and today was the tipping point. Something was going to happen this very evening, and everyone was aware of the fact, though no one could predict the nature of the event.
From up ahead, he heard a booming voice cry out, “Hear the word! Hear the word! The rapture is nigh! The rapture is nigh! Hear the word!”
He also became aware that someone was addressing him. He looked down to his right and was rather startled when the motion caused his neck to emit a soft whir.
Algernon Swinburne was at his side, hatless and dressed in an absurd one-piece red-velvet suit with an Elizabethan-style ruffled collar. Trounce was on the other side of the poet, sans moustache, his hair down to his shoulders, his waist much slimmer, his clothes plain, white, and functional.
Swinburne was saying, “—that Ireland is habitable for the first time in three hundred and sixty years or so. I wonder whether the whole business of the potato blight and the carnivorous plants that drove away the population had its origin in one of the alternate histories, and if the vegetation was somehow a different and much less benevolent iteration of this, our own jungle.”
“Well you, of all people, should know.” It took Burton a moment to realise that he’d articulated the sentence—and, indeed, that it was a sentence, for it had sounded like an orchestra of handbells and bagpipes. Not his own voice at all. Not even a human one.
What am I?
“It was a version of you, after all,” he continued to wheeze and chime, “that received a dose of a venom designed by Prussian eugenicists, and who transformed into this jungle as a result of it.”
The poet looked up at him, and Burton thought he detected in his friend’s eyes that he was also riding inside himself, with no power to influence what this variation of Swinburne did or said.
“True, but it also caused that particular Algernon to develop a wholly different order of sentience than the human. I have no better idea of what he—or, rather, it—is up to than you do.”
“It appears to me that, since we arrived in this future, human sentience has itself altered considerably. Might the pollen carry the venom? Is everyone slowly mutating into vegetation?”
“There’s been no evidence to suggest it. And let us not forget that the air is thick with nanotechnology, too, which previously functioned to keep the population subdued. That microscopic machinery has now blended with the pollen, so we all have neither one thing nor the other in our bloodstreams, but rather an amalgam of both. All except you, of course.”
Why not me?
“But to return to my point,” Swinburne continued, “has it not occurred to you that if the disaster in Ireland had never happened there wouldn’t have been the great Irish exodus to America and the history of the Anglo-Saxon Empire might have been very different. The politicians who forged that continent’s alliance with the old British Empire were, after all, Irish-Americans.”
“Were they?”
“Haven’t you been reading The History of the Future? The Kennedy family? The nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties?”
“I’ve been preoccupied.”
“I noticed. What with?”
“Need you ask?” Burton extended his arms and was shocked to see that there were six of them, all fashioned from polished brass and made flexible by cog-wheeled joints, rods, and miniature pistons. One of them ended in a stump. Another had a large gun affixed to it. All were fitted with extendible tools of various sorts.
This is why I’m an exception. I’m a machine.
From amid the mental noise of his motion, more memories surfaced, and Burton was suddenly aware that the life of the doppelgänger he occupied made his own story—judged as extraordinary by his contemporaries—appear dull by comparison. Indeed, so outré was it that his counterpart now inhabited this mechanical body, which had originally served to keep the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel alive before it was hijacked by the insane mind of Spring Heeled Jack, the time traveller.
Swinburne went on. “My proposition is that we must extricate the notion of cause and effect from the restrictive shackles of sequence. Once we accept that an effect can come—from the perspective of our regimented perception of time—before its cause, then we might understand that coincidences, far from being nothing but chance, are meaningful elements of a bigger process.”
The poet reached out and tapped his forefinger against one of Burton’s brass arms.
“The Irish famine is one such example. You are another.”
“Me?”
“The transference of your consciousness into the black diamonds inside that body’s mechanical brain can be easily explained. You had me shoot you dead so your brain’s terminal emanation would overwrite the presence of Spring Heeled Jack, which existed within them. Thus you wiped him out of existence while also ensuring that your mind survived the fatal injuries he’d inflicted upon you. As fantastical as that might be, it at least makes sequential sense. What’s more difficult to comprehend is the fact that you’ve ended up in that body at this particular juncture in history.”
A woman with wide bat-like wings swooped over them and landed on a branch, wrapping her prehensile fingers, toes, and tail around it. Her face was illuminated by a dangling pear-like fruit, which exuded a soft yellow light. She smiled at Burton, blinked her big, round black eyes, reached for the fruit and plucked it, then turned and launched herself back into the air, flapping away.
“This particular juncture?” Burton watched her go. He noted that stars were beginning to prick the sky.
William Trounce spoke for the first time. “Algy has a point. You might be the only person in the entire empire who doesn’t feel the imminence of the rapture.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call it that.”
“Humph!”
Trounce gestured ahead to where, hidden from view by clumped leaves, the voice continued to proclaim with foghorn volume, “Hear the word! The rapture is nigh! The rapture is nigh!”
“It’s what the people have named it.”
Swinburne said, “I understand and share your dislike of the word, Richard. In your native time period, it had specific connotations. However, I feel certain that, whatever happens tonight, it will bear no resemblance to the Rapture of defunct Christianity. It’ll be quite different. An evolutionary leap, perhaps. A deeper integration with existence engendered by the assimilation of botanical and technological elements into the human body.”
“As predictions go, that’s rather a specific one,” Burton observed.
The poet shrugged. “Call it intuition.”
It occurred to Burton that this was not the Algernon Swinburne he’d known during his lifetime, who’d been plucked from his deathbed in 1909 and restored to 18
64, there to imbibe in the Slug and Lettuce with the equally revitalised Burton and Trounce. Nor was he the one familiar to the version of Burton inhabiting this mechanical body, with whom the poet had shared adventures so extraordinary that the recollection of them was almost impossible for the inner Burton to comprehend. No, this Swinburne possessed a gravitas neither versions of the explorer would have attributed to him.
Again, unbidden, knowledge blossomed. During the voyage to this future, the “authentic” Algernon Swinburne—and William Trounce, too—had been killed. The men walking beside Burton were copies. Clones. And brothers! Carried by the same woman!
Burton, who possessed no familiarity with the concept of cloning, suddenly did, and the wonder of it was that it failed to astonish him, this because his mind was already overloaded. He received but could not process. Such information might perhaps make sense eventually—as it obviously did to his host—but for now all he could manage to do was watch and listen, allowing the bizarre experiences and memories to overlay his own in the manner—just as Sadhvi Raghavendra had said—of a palimpsest.
He recalled that he was, in reality, sitting with his companions before a cloaked man aboard the Orpheus and began to will himself to return to that place. Then he stopped, afraid that he’d peel away illusion upon illusion until he was back in his bedroom in Trieste, in the throes of a heart attack.
“Hear the word! Hear the word! The rapture is coming! Any time now! Be prepared! The rapture is nigh!”
Just ahead, the source of the loud pronouncements came into view: a distorted figure squatting on the corner of a junction between two trails, with a wagon loaded with fruit, nuts, and vegetables in front of it. Short and bulbous—dressed in baggy garments and with a flat cap upon its broad head—the creature was little more than a blob with seemingly boneless arms protruding from it and a head that grew straight from the torso without mediation from anything resembling a neck. The froggish face, jutting forward, was split by a mouth so wide that its corners touched the tiny vestigial ears.